The story which is narrated in the following pages came
to me from the lips of my old friend Allan Quatermain, or Hunter Quatermain, as
we used to call him in South Africa. He told it to me one evening when I was
stopping with him at the place he bought in Yorkshire. Shortly after that, the
death of his only son so unsettled him that he immediately left England,
accompanied by two companions, his old fellow-voyagers, Sir Henry Curtis and
Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into the dark heart of Africa. He is
persuaded that a white people, of which he has heard rumours all his life,
exists somewhere on the highlands in the vast, still unexplored interior, and
his great ambition is to find them before he dies. This is the wild quest upon
which he and his companions have departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect
they never will return. One letter only have I received from the old gentleman,
dated from a mission station high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about
three hundred miles north of Zanzibar. In it he says that they have gone through
many hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and have found traces
which go far towards making him hope that the results of their wild quest may be
a "magnificent and unexampled discovery." I greatly fear, however,
that all he has discovered is death; for this letter came a long while ago, and
nobody has heard a single word of the party since. They have totally vanished.

It was on the last
evening of my stay at his house that he told the ensuing story to me and Captain
Good, who was dining with him. He had eaten his dinner and drunk two or three
glasses of old port, just to help Good and myself to the end of the second
bottle. It was an unusual thing for him to do, for he was a most abstemious man,
having conceived, as he used to say, a great horror of drink from observing its
effects upon the class of colonists--hunters, transport riders and
others--amongst whom he had passed so many years of his life. Consequently the
good wine took more effect on him than it would have done on most men, sending a
little flush into his wrinkled cheeks, and making him talk more freely than
usual.

Dear old man! I can see
him now, as he went limping up and down the vestibule, with his grey hair
sticking up in scrubbing-brush fashion, his shrivelled yellow face, and his
large dark eyes, that were as keen as any hawk's, and yet soft as a buck's. The
whole room was hung with trophies of his numerous hunting expeditions, and he
had some story about every one of them, if only he could be got to tell it.
Generally he would not, for he was not very fond of narrating his own adventures,
but to-night the port wine made him more communicative.

"Ah, you brute!"
he said, stopping beneath an unusually large skull of a lion, which was fixed
just over the mantelpiece, beneath a long row of guns, its jaws distended to
their utmost width. "Ah, you brute! you have given me a lot of trouble for
the last dozen years, and will, I suppose to my dying day."

"Tell us the yarn,
Quatermain," said Good. "You have often promised to tell me, and you
never have."

"You had better not
ask me to," he answered, "for it is a longish one."

"All right," I
said, "the evening is young, and there is some more port."

Thus adjured, he filled
his pipe from a jar of coarse-cut Boer tobacco that was always standing on the
mantelpiece, and still walking up and down the room, began--

"It was, I think, in
the March of '69 that I was up in Sikukuni's country. It was just after old
Sequati's time, and Sikukuni had got into power--I forget how. Anyway, I was
there. I had heard that the Bapedi people had brought down an enormous quantity
of ivory from the interior, and so I started with a waggon-load of goods, and
came straight away from Middelburg to try and trade some of it. It was a risky
thing to go into the country so early, on account of the fever; but I knew that
there were one or two others after that lot of ivory, so I determined to have a
try for it, and take my chance of fever. I had become so tough from continual
knocking about that I did not set it down at much.

"Well, I got on all
right for a while. It is a wonderfully beautiful piece of bush veldt, with great
ranges of mountains running through it, and round granite koppies starting up
here and there, looking out like sentinels over the rolling waste of bush. But
it is very hot--hot as a stew-pan--and when I was there that March, which, of
course, is autumn in this part of Africa, the whole place reeked of fever. Every
morning, as I trekked along down by the Oliphant River, I used to creep from the
waggon at dawn and look out. But there was no river to be seen--only a long line
of billows of what looked like the finest cotton wool tossed up lightly with a
pitchfork. It was the fever mist. Out from among the scrub, too, came little
spirals of vapour, as though there were hundreds of tiny fires alight in
it--reek rising from thousands of tons of rotting vegetation. It was a beautiful
place, but the beauty was the beauty of death; and all those lines and blots of
vapour wrote one great word across the surface of the country, and that word was
'fever.'

"It was a dreadful
year of illness that. I came, I remember, to one little kraal of Knobnoses, and
went up to it to see if I could get some 'maas', or curdled butter-milk, and a
few mealies. As I drew near I was struck with the silence of the place. No
children began to chatter, and no dogs barked. Nor could I see any native sheep
or cattle. The place, though it had evidently been inhabited of late, was as
still as the bush round it, and some guinea-fowl got up out of the prickly pear
bushes right at the kraal gate. I remember that I hesitated a little before
going in, there was such an air of desolation about the spot. Nature never looks
desolate when man has not yet laid his hand upon her breast; she is only lonely.
But when man has been, and has passed away, then she looks desolate.

"Well, I passed
into the kraal, and went up to the principal hut. In front of the hut was
something with an old sheep-skin kaross thrown over it. I stooped down and drew
off the rug, and then shrank back amazed, for under it was the body of a young
woman recently dead. For a moment I thought of turning back, but my curiosity
overcame me; so going past the dead woman, I went down on my hands and knees and
crept into the hut. It was so dark that I could not see anything, though I could
smell a great deal, so I lit a match. It was a 'tandstickor' match, and burnt
slowly and dimly, and as the light gradually increased I made out what I took to
be a family of people, men, women, and children, fast asleep. Presently it burnt
up brightly, and I saw that they too, five of them altogether, were quite dead.
One was a baby. I dropped the match in a hurry, and was making my way from the
hut as quick as I could go, when I caught sight of two bright eyes staring out
of a corner. Thinking it was a wild cat, or some such animal, I redoubled my
haste, when suddenly a voice near the eyes began first to mutter, and then to
send up a succession of awful yells.

"Hastily I lit
another match, and perceived that the eyes belonged to an old woman, wrapped up
in a greasy leather garment. Taking her by the arm, I dragged her out, for she
could not, or would not, come by herself, and the stench was overpowering me.
Such a sight as she was--a bag of bones, covered over with black, shrivelled
parchment. The only white thing about her was her wool, and she seemed to be
pretty well dead except for her eyes and her voice. She thought that I was a
devil come to take her, and that is why she yelled so. Well, I got her down to
the waggon, and gave her a 'tot' of Cape smoke, and then, as soon as it was
ready, poured about a pint of beef-tea down her throat, made from the flesh of a
blue vilderbeeste I had killed the day before, and after that she brightened up
wonderfully. She could talk Zulu--indeed, it turned out that she had run away
from Zululand in T'Chaka's time--and she told me that all the people whom I had
seen had died of fever. When they had died the other inhabitants of the kraal
had taken the cattle and gone away, leaving the poor old woman, who was helpless
from age and infirmity, to perish of starvation or disease, as the case might
be. She had been sitting there for three days among the bodies when I found her.
I took her on to the next kraal, and gave the headman a blanket to look after
her, promising him another if I found her well when I came back. I remember that
he was much astonished at my parting with two blankets for the sake of such a
worthless old creature. 'Why did I not leave her in the bush?' he asked. Those
people carry the doctrine of the survival of the fittest to its extreme, you
see.

"It was the night
after I had got rid of the old woman that I made my first acquaintance with my
friend yonder," and he nodded towards the skull that seemed to be grinning
down at us in the shadow of the wide mantelshelf. "I had trekked from dawn
till eleven o'clock--a long trek--but I wanted to get on, and had turned the
oxen out to graze, sending the voorlooper to look after them, my intention being
to inspan again about six o'clock, and trek with the moon till ten. Then I got
into the waggon and had a good sleep till half-past two or so in the afternoon,
when I rose and cooked some meat, and had my dinner, washing it down with a
pannikin of black coffee--for it was difficult to get preserved milk in those
days. Just as I had finished, and the driver, a man called Tom, was washing up
the things, in comes the young scoundrel of a voorlooper driving one ox before
him.

"'Koos!' he said, 'Koos!
the other oxen have gone away. I turned my back for a minute, and when I looked
round again they were all gone except Kaptein, here, who was rubbing his back
against a tree.'

"'You mean that you
have been asleep, and let them stray, you villain. I will rub your back against
a stick,' I answered, feeling very angry, for it was not a pleasant prospect to
be stuck up in that fever trap for a week or so while we were hunting for the
oxen. 'Off you go, and you too, Tom, and mind you don't come back till you have
found them. They have trekked back along the Middelburg Road, and are a dozen
miles off by now, I'll be bound. Now, no words; go both of you.'

"Tom, the driver,
swore, and caught the lad a hearty kick, which he richly deserved, and then,
having tied old Kaptein up to the disselboom with a reim, they took their
assegais and sticks, and started. I would have gone too, only I knew that
somebody must look after the waggon, and I did not like to leave either of the
boys with it at night. I was in a very bad temper, indeed, although I was pretty
well used to these sort of occurrences, and soothed myself by taking a rifle and
going to kill something. For a couple of hours I poked about without seeing
anything that I could get a shot at, but at last, just as I was again within
seventy yards of the waggon, I put up an old Impala ram from behind a mimosa
thorn. He ran straight for the waggon, and it was not till he was passing within
a few feet of it that I could get a decent shot at him. Then I pulled, and
caught him half-way down the spine. Over he went, dead as a door-nail, and a
pretty shot it was, though I ought not to say it. This little incident put me
into rather a better humour, especially as the buck had rolled right against the
after-part of the waggon, so I had only to gut him, fix a reim round his legs,
and haul him up. By the time I had done this the sun was down, and the full moon
was up, and a beautiful moon it was. And then there came that wonderful hush
which sometimes falls over the African bush in the early hours of the night. No
beast was moving, and no bird called. Not a breath of air stirred the quiet
trees, and the shadows did not even quiver, they only grew. It was very
oppressive and very lonely, for there was not a sign of the cattle or the boys.
I was quite thankful for the society of old Kaptein, who was lying down
contentedly against the disselboom, chewing the cud with a good conscience.

"Presently, however,
Kaptein began to get restless. First he snorted, then he got up and snorted
again. I could not make it out, so like a fool I got down off the waggon-box to
have a look round, thinking it might be the lost oxen coming.

"Next instant I
regretted it, for all of a sudden I heard a roar and saw something yellow flash
past me and light on poor Kaptein. Then came a bellow of agony from the ox, and
a crunch as the lion put his teeth through the poor brute's neck, and I began to
understand what had happened. My rifle was in the waggon, and my first thought
being to get hold of it, I turned and made a bolt for the box. I got my foot up
on the wheel and flung my body forward on to the waggon, and there I stopped as
if I were frozen, and no wonder, for as I was about to spring up I heard the
lion behind me, and next second I felt the brute, ay, as plainly as I can feel
this table. I felt him, I say, sniffing at my left leg that was hanging down.

"My word! I did
feel queer; I don't think that I ever felt so queer before. I dared not move for
the life of me, and the odd thing was that I seemed to lose power over my leg,
which developed an insane sort of inclination to kick out of its own mere
motion--just as hysterical people want to laugh when they ought to be
particularly solemn. Well, the lion sniffed and sniffed, beginning at my ankle
and slowly nosing away up to my thigh. I thought that he was going to get hold
then, but he did not. He only growled softly, and went back to the ox. Shifting
my head a little I got a full view of him. He was about the biggest lion I ever
saw, and I have seen a great many, and he had a most tremendous black mane. What
his teeth were like you can see--look there, pretty big ones, ain't they?
Altogether he was a magnificent animal, and as I lay sprawling on the
fore-tongue of the waggon, it occurred to me that he would look uncommonly well
in a cage. He stood there by the carcass of poor Kaptein, and deliberately
disembowelled him as neatly as a butcher could have done. All this while I dared
not move, for he kept lifting his head and keeping an eye on me as he licked his
bloody chops. When he had cleaned Kaptein out he opened his mouth and roared,
and I am not exaggerating when I say that the sound shook the waggon. Instantly
there came back an answering roar.

"Hardly was the
thought out of my head when I caught sight in the moonlight of the lioness
bounding along through the long grass, and after her a couple of cubs about the
size of mastiffs. She stopped within a few feet of my head, and stood, waved her
tail, and fixed me with her glowing yellow eyes; but just as I thought that it
was all over she turned and began to feed on Kaptein, and so did the cubs. There
were the four of them within eight feet of me, growling and quarrelling, rending
and tearing, and crunching poor Kaptein's bones; and there I lay shaking with
terror, and the cold perspiration pouring out of me, feeling like another Daniel
come to judgment in a new sense of the phrase. Presently the cubs had eaten
their fill, and began to get restless. One went round to the back of the waggon
and pulled at the Impala buck that hung there, and the other came round my way
and commenced the sniffing game at my leg. Indeed, he did more than that, for,
my trouser being hitched up a little, he began to lick the bare skin with his
rough tongue. The more he licked the more he liked it, to judge from his
increased vigour and the loud purring noise he made. Then I knew that the end
had come, for in another second his file-like tongue would have rasped through
the skin of my leg--which was luckily pretty tough--and have drawn the blood,
and then there would be no chance for me. So I just lay there and thought of my
sins, and prayed to the Almighty, and reflected that after all life was a very
enjoyable thing.

"Then of a sudden I
heard a crashing of bushes and the shouting and whistling of men, and there were
the two boys coming back with the cattle, which they had found trekking along
all together. The lions lifted their heads and listened, then bounded off
without a sound--and I fainted.

"The lions came
back no more that night, and by the next morning my nerves had got pretty
straight again; but I was full of wrath when I thought of all that I had gone
through at the hands, or rather noses, of those four brutes, and of the fate of
my after-ox Kaptein. He was a splendid ox, and I was very fond of him. So wroth
was I that like a fool I determined to attack the whole family of them. It was
worthy of a greenhorn out on his first hunting trip; but I did it nevertheless.
Accordingly after breakfast, having rubbed some oil upon my leg, which was very
sore from the cub's tongue, I took the driver, Tom, who did not half like the
business, and having armed myself with an ordinary double No. 12 smoothbore, the
first breechloader I ever had, I started. I took the smoothbore because it shot
a bullet very well; and my experience has been that a round ball from a
smoothbore is quite as effective against a lion as an express bullet. The lion
is soft, and not a difficult animal to finish if you hit him anywhere in the
body. A buck takes far more killing.

"Well, I started,
and the first thing I set to work to do was to try to discover whereabouts the
brutes lay up for the day. About three hundred yards from the waggon was the
crest of a rise covered with single mimosa trees, dotted about in a park-like
fashion, and beyond this lay a stretch of open plain running down to a dry pan,
or water-hole, which covered about an acre of ground, and was densely clothed
with reeds, now in the sere and yellow leaf. From the further edge of this pan
the ground sloped up again to a great cleft, or nullah, which had been cut out
by the action of the water, and was pretty thickly sprinkled with bush, amongst
which grew some large trees, I forget of what sort.

"It at once struck
me that the dry pan would be a likely place to find my friends in, as there is
nothing a lion is fonder of than lying up in reeds, through which he can see
things without being seen himself. Accordingly thither I went and prospected.
Before I had got half-way round the pan I found the remains of a blue
vilderbeeste that had evidently been killed within the last three or four days
and partially devoured by lions; and from other indications about I was soon
assured that if the family were not in the pan that day they spent a good deal
of their spare time there. But if there, the question was how to get them out;
for it was clearly impossible to think of going in after them unless one was
quite determined to commit suicide. Now there was a strong wind blowing from the
direction of the waggon, across the reedy pan towards the bush-clad kloof or
donga, and this first gave me the idea of firing the reeds, which, as I think I
told you, were pretty dry. Accordingly Tom took some matches and began starting
little fires to the left, and I did the same to the right. But the reeds were
still green at the bottom, and we should never have got them well alight had it
not been for the wind, which grew stronger and stronger as the sun climbed
higher, and forced the fire into them. At last, after half-an-hour's trouble,
the flames got a hold, and began to spread out like a fan, whereupon I went
round to the further side of the pan to wait for the lions, standing well out in
the open, as we stood at the copse to-day where you shot the woodcock. It was a
rather risky thing to do, but I used to be so sure of my shooting in those days
that I did not so much mind the risk. Scarcely had I got round when I heard the
reeds parting before the onward rush of some animal. 'Now for it,' said I. On it
came. I could see that it was yellow, and prepared for action, when instead of a
lion out bounded a beautiful reit bok which had been lying in the shelter of the
pan. It must, by the way, have been a reit bok of a peculiarly confiding nature
to lay itself down with the lion, like the lamb of prophesy, but I suppose the
reeds were thick, and that it kept a long way off.

"Well, I let the
reit bok go, and it went like the wind, and kept my eyes fixed upon the reeds.
The fire was burning like a furnace now; the flames crackling and roaring as
they bit into the reeds, sending spouts of fire twenty feet and more into the
air, and making the hot air dance above in a way that was perfectly dazzling.
But the reeds were still half green, and created an enormous quantity of smoke,
which came rolling towards me like a curtain, lying very low on account of the
wind. Presently, above the crackling of the fire, I heard a startled roar, then
another and another. So the lions were at home.

"I was beginning to
get excited now, for, as you fellows know, there is nothing in experience to
warm up your nerves like a lion at close quarters, unless it is a wounded
buffalo; and I became still more so when I made out through the smoke that the
lions were all moving about on the extreme edge of the reeds. Occasionally they
would pop their heads out like rabbits from a burrow, and then, catching sight
of me standing about fifty yards away, draw them back again. I knew that it must
be getting pretty warm behind them, and that they could not keep the game up for
long; and I was not mistaken, for suddenly all four of them broke cover together,
the old black-maned lion leading by a few yards. I never saw a more splendid
sight in all my hunting experience than those four lions bounding across the
veldt, overshadowed by the dense pall of smoke and backed by the fiery furnace
of the burning reeds.

"I reckoned that
they would pass, on their way to the bushy kloof, within about five and twenty
yards of me, so, taking a long breath, I got my gun well on to the lion's
shoulder--the black-maned one--so as to allow for an inch or two of motion, and
catch him through the heart. I was on, dead on, and my finger was just beginning
to tighten on the trigger, when suddenly I went blind--a bit of reed-ash had
drifted into my right eye. I danced and rubbed, and succeeded in clearing it
more or less just in time to see the tail of the last lion vanishing round the
bushes up the kloof.

"If ever a man was
mad I was that man. It was too bad; and such a shot in the open! However, I was
not going to be beaten, so I just turned and marched for the kloof. Tom, the
driver, begged and implored me not to go, but though as a general rule I never
pretend to be very brave (which I am not), I was determined that I would either
kill those lions or they should kill me. So I told Tom that he need not come
unless he liked, but I was going; and being a plucky fellow, a Swazi by birth,
he shrugged his shoulders, muttered that I was mad or bewitched, and followed
doggedly in my tracks.

"We soon reached
the kloof, which was about three hundred yards in length and but sparsely wooded,
and then the real fun began. There might be a lion behind every bush--there
certainly were four lions somewhere; the delicate question was, where. I peeped
and poked and looked in every possible direction, with my heart in my mouth, and
was at last rewarded by catching a glimpse of something yellow moving behind a
bush. At the same moment, from another bush opposite me out burst one of the
cubs and galloped back towards the burnt pan. I whipped round and let drive a
snap shot that tipped him head over heels, breaking his back within two inches
of the root of the tail, and there he lay helpless but glaring. Tom afterwards
killed him with his assegai. I opened the breech of the gun and hurriedly pulled
out the old case, which, to judge from what ensued, must, I suppose, have burst
and left a portion of its fabric sticking to the barrel. At any rate, when I
tried to, get in the new cartridge it would only enter half-way; and--would you
believe it?--this was the moment that the lioness, attracted no doubt by the
outcry of her cub, chose to put in an appearance. There she stood, twenty paces
or so from me, lashing her tail and looking just as wicked as it is possible to
conceive. Slowly I stepped backwards, trying to push in the new case, and as I
did so she moved on in little runs, dropping down after each run. The danger was
imminent, and the case would not go in. At the moment I oddly enough thought of
the cartridge maker, whose name I will not mention, and earnestly hoped that if
the lion got _me_ some condign punishment would overtake _him._ It would not go
in, so I tried to pull it out. It would not come out either, and my gun was
useless if I could not shut it to use the other barrel. I might as well have had
no gun.

"Meanwhile I was
walking backward, keeping my eye on the lioness, who was creeping forward on her
belly without a sound, but lashing her tail and keeping her eye on me; and in it
I saw that she was coming in a few seconds more. I dashed my wrist and the palm
of my hand against the brass rim of the cartridge till the blood poured from
them--look, there are the scars of it to this day!"

Here Quatermain held up
his right hand to the light and showed us four or five white cicatrices just
where the wrist is set into the hand.

"But it was not of
the slightest use," he went on, "the cartridge would not move. I only
hope that no other man will ever be put in such an awful position. The lioness
gathered herself together, and I gave myself up for lost, when suddenly Tom
shouted out from somewhere in my rear--

"'All right, Tom,'
I answered. 'I will when I have killed those three other lions,' for by this
time I was bent on shooting them as I never remember being bent on anything
before or since. 'You can go if you like, or you can get up a tree.'

"He considered the
position a little, and then he very wisely got up a tree. I wish that I had done
the same.

"Meanwhile I had
found my knife, which had an extractor in it, and succeeded after some
difficulty in pulling out the cartridge which had so nearly been the cause of my
death, and removing the obstruction in the barrel. It was very little thicker
than a postage-stamp; certainly not thicker than a piece of writing-paper. This
done, I loaded the gun, bound a handkerchief round my wrist and hand to staunch
the flowing of the blood, and started on again.

"I had noticed that
the lioness went into a thick green bush, or rather cluster of bushes, growing
near the water, about fifty yards higher up, for there was a little stream
running down the kloof, and I walked towards this bush. When I got there,
however, I could see nothing, so I took up a big stone and threw it into the
bushes. I believe that it hit the other cub, for out it came with a rush, giving
me a broadside shot, of which I promptly availed myself, knocking it over dead.
Out, too, came the lioness like a flash of light, but quick as she went I
managed to put the other bullet into her ribs, so that she rolled right over
three times like a shot rabbit. I instantly got two more cartridges into the gun,
and as I did so the lioness rose again and came crawling towards me on her
fore-paws, roaring and groaning, and with such an expression of diabolical fury
on her countenance as I have not often seen. I shot her again through the chest,
and she fell over on to her side quite dead.

"That was the first
and last time that I ever killed a brace of lions right and left, and, what is
more, I never heard of anybody else doing it. Naturally I was considerably
pleased with myself, and having again loaded up, I went on to look for the
black-maned beauty who had killed Kaptein. Slowly, and with the greatest care, I
proceeded up the kloof, searching every bush and tuft of grass as I went. It was
wonderfully exciting, work, for I never was sure from one moment to another but
that he would be on me. I took comfort, however, from the reflection that a lion
rarely attacks a man--rarely, I say; sometimes he does, as you will see--unless
he is cornered or wounded. I must have been nearly an hour hunting after that
lion. Once I thought I saw something move in a clump of tambouki grass, but I
could not be sure, and when I trod out the grass I could not find him.

"At last I worked
up to the head of the kloof, which made a cul-de-sac. It was formed of a wall of
rock about fifty feet high. Down this rock trickled a little waterfall, and in
front of it, some seventy feet from its face, rose a great piled-up mass of
boulders, in the crevices and on the top of which grew ferns, grasses, and
stunted bushes. This mass was about twenty-five feet high. The sides of the
kloof here were also very steep. Well, I came to the top of the nullah and
looked all round. No signs of the lion. Evidently I had either overlooked him
further down or he had escaped right away. It was very vexatious; but still
three lions were not a bad bag for one gun before dinner, and I was fain to be
content. Accordingly I departed back again, making my way round the isolated
pillar of boulders, beginning to feel, as I did so, that I was pretty well done
up with excitement and fatigue, and should be more so before I had skinned those
three lions. When I had got, as nearly as I could judge, about eighteen yards
past the pillar or mass of boulders, I turned to have another look round. I have
a pretty sharp eye, but I could see nothing at all.

"Then, on a sudden,
I saw something sufficiently alarming. On the top of the mass of boulders,
opposite to me, standing out clear against the rock beyond, was the huge
black-maned lion. He had been crouching there, and now arose as though by magic.
There he stood lashing his tail, just like a living reproduction of the animal
on the gateway of Northumberland House that I have seen in a picture. But he did
not stand long. Before I could fire--before I could do more than get the gun to
my shoulder--he sprang straight up and out from the rock, and driven by the
impetus of that one mighty bound came hurtling through the air towards me.

"Heavens! how grand
he looked, and how awful! High into the air he flew, describing a great arch.
Just as he touched the highest point of his spring I fired. I did not dare to
wait, for I saw that he would clear the whole space and land right upon me.
Without a sight, almost without aim, I fired, as one would fire a snap shot at a
snipe. The bullet told, for I distinctly heard its thud above the rushing sound
caused by the passage of the lion through the air. Next second I was swept to
the ground (luckily I fell into a low, creeper-clad bush, which broke the shock),
and the lion was on the top of me, and the next those great white teeth of his
had met in my thigh--I heard them grate against the bone. I yelled out in agony,
for I did not feel in the least benumbed and happy, like Dr. Livingstone--whom,
by the way, I knew very well--and gave myself up for dead. But suddenly, at that
moment, the lion's grip on my thigh loosened, and he stood over me, swaying to
and fro, his huge mouth, from which the blood was gushing, wide opened. Then he
roared, and the sound shook the rocks.

"To and fro he
swung, and then the great head dropped on me, knocking all the breath from my
body, and he was dead. My bullet had entered in the centre of his chest and
passed out on the right side of the spine about half way down the back.

"The pain of my
wound kept me from fainting, and as soon as I got my breath I managed to drag
myself from under him. Thank heavens, his great teeth had not crushed my
thigh-bone; but I was losing a great deal of blood, and had it not been for the
timely arrival of Tom, with whose aid I loosed the handkerchief from my wrist
and tied it round my leg, twisting it tight with a stick, I think that I should
have bled to death.

"Well, it was a
just reward for my folly in trying to tackle a family of lions single-handed.
The odds were too long. I have been lame ever since, and shall be to my dying
day; in the month of March the wound always troubles me a great deal, and every
three years it breaks out raw.

"I need scarcely
add that I never traded the lot of ivory at Sikukuni's. Another man got it--a
German--and made five hundred pounds out of it after paying expenses. I spent
the next month on the broad of my back, and was a cripple for six months after
that. And now I've told you the yarn, so I will have a drop of Hollands and go
to bed. Good-night to you all, good-night!"